WASHINGTON (AP) — Daily bombing campaigns between the United States and Iran are continuing as both nations fight for dominance over the Strait of Hormuz — and neither side shows any sign of giving ground. The standoff is exposing the limits of President Donald Trump’s strategy of using escalating airstrikes to force Tehran into compliance.
Although the Trump administration says it remains willing to pursue diplomatic talks, Iran has not relaxed its hold on the critical Persian Gulf oil corridor. The intensifying conflict has already unraveled an interim ceasefire agreement, claimed more American military lives, and driven U.S. gasoline prices upward — creating fresh political headaches for Republicans heading into the midterm elections.
Despite faint hopes for negotiations, the two countries may be sliding toward full-scale war. Trump has warned that “every time Iran kills an American Soldier” going forward, “they will pay for that killing many times over.”
The latest escalations reflect “a fundamental misreading of the Iranian psyche and a lack of learning” from earlier stages of the fighting, according to Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“I think it’s driven by a calculus on either side that they can double down on military escalation as a way of breaking the impasse and getting the other side to relent,” Yacoubian said. “The danger, of course, is that the more escalatory it becomes, the harder it will be to seize any potential opening back to diplomacy.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday evening that the U.S. door remains open to negotiation. He told reporters that Iran “continues to send signals that they want to talk, that they want to negotiate, but their behavior is what we’re responding to. And their behavior is they’re launching missiles and drones at ships” in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil normally travels.
“The United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution, and we’ve tried multiple times with Iran, and we’ll continue to try,” Rubio added. “If that door opens, we’ll be happy to see it open.”
According to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, Trump is focused on holding Iran accountable for recent American troop deaths, violations of last month’s interim agreement, and attacks on vessels in the strait. That official also said military strikes would continue until Trump decides to stop them, while diplomatic channels remain open simultaneously.
Outside analysts say the administration appears to be struggling to find a way out of the conflict, both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
“This administration currently is flustered,” said Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat who participated in past nuclear negotiations with Tehran and is now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “It really doesn’t have a coherent and consistent strategy as to how to extricate itself from this quagmire.”
Defense experts caution that there are real limits to what an air campaign alone can achieve. Christopher Preble, a scholar at the Stimson Center think tank who focuses on U.S. foreign policy, said the conflict has made clear the shortcomings of relying exclusively on air power. At the same time, he noted that deploying ground troops would be deeply unpopular with the American public and members of Congress.
“It seems that President Trump certainly has the capability to continue to bomb, and Iran will have the capability to continue to keep the strait closed — or closed well enough,” Preble said.
David Schenker, who served in the first Trump administration and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the current wave of strikes on Iranian infrastructure mirrors attacks carried out during the war’s opening weeks — attacks that did not force Iran to stand down.
“The U.S. hit 13,000 targets in the first 6 weeks of the war, and this didn’t sway Iran to take a knee,” he said.
Retired Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under the previous administration, said history — including the Vietnam War — has shown the limits of air power used in isolation.
“Generally, you have to couple air power with ground operations, sometimes naval operations as well, and certainly space today,” he said.
Kendall noted that when the war began on February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces struck many pre-identified fixed targets. But Iran had ample time beforehand to hide and scatter its weapons systems.
“So the easy targets are pretty much gone,” Kendall said. “They can hide ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and small air vehicles pretty easily. So it’s a very hard job to try to suppress that kind of a threat over a period of time. And that’s why they’re still able to attack not just ships in the Straits, but also our bases in the region and so on.”
A negotiated resolution also looks uncertain. Eyre said the Trump administration has shown little appetite for genuine diplomacy, leaning instead on close advisers with limited international relations experience and handing off much of the mediation work to countries like Qatar, Pakistan, and Egypt.
“We’ve got a tough road ahead of us, but it theoretically could be done,” Eyre said of potential peace talks. “Unfortunately, there is so little mutual confidence in the other side. There’s so little bilateral trust between the U.S. and Iran that it makes everything so much harder.”
Both Schenker and Yacoubian noted that recent statements from Trump, Rubio, and Iranian officials suggest at least some openness to diplomacy. Yacoubian pointed to what she described as a “measured” response from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following the recent deaths of U.S. service members in Jordan as a potential sign of restraint. She also cited Iran’s release last week of an Iranian-American woman who had been prevented from leaving the country as a gesture of goodwill from Tehran.
However, those small positive signals could quickly be overshadowed if a decision by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels — who announced a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia on Monday — expands into a full shutdown of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
Yacoubian warned that such a development could create “a perfect storm of disruption” for an already fragile global economy.
